Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson die while on a winter concert tour in the Midwest. 1966 The Soviet Union’s probe Luna IX becomes the first man-made object to make a soft landing on the moon. 1995Eileen Collins becomes the first women to pilot the space shuttle, when space shuttle Discovery blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. 1894Painter Norman Rockwell, whose works offered a slice of Americana during the middle 20th Century, is born in New York City.

2003Record producer Phil Spector is arrested in the shooting death of actress Lana Clarkson.

2006An Egyptian passenger ferry sinks in the Red Sea in bad weather. More than 1,000 passengers are killed. And in 1809Composer Felix Mendelssohn, whose Wedding March remains popular to this day, is born in Hamburg, Germany. Today in History, February 3rd, Bryant Thomas, the Associated Press.